Estate Planning

Estate planning is for every adult, not just the wealthy.

If you own anything, have anyone who depends on you, or have an opinion about who should make decisions when you can’t, you have an estate plan. The only question is whether you wrote it or whether Florida’s default rules wrote it for you.

At BRIA Capital Group, we don’t draft legal documents. That work belongs to your estate attorney. What we do is coordinate the financial side of the plan, the account titling, beneficiary designations, and tax positioning that make those documents actually work when they’re needed.

What this covers

A complete estate plan is a small set of documents and a larger set of decisions about how money is owned and who receives it.

• Last Will and Testament. Directs how probate assets are distributed, names guardians for minor children, and appoints an executor.
• Living Will (Advance Directive). States your wishes for end-of-life medical care.
• Durable Power of Attorney (financial). Names someone to handle financial matters if you become incapacitated.
• Health Care Surrogate (medical POA). Names someone to make medical decisions on your behalf.
• Revocable Living Trust. A trust you control during your lifetime that can hold assets, avoid probate, and provide for smooth management if you become incapacitated.
• Irrevocable Trust. A trust you generally can’t undo, often used for asset protection, special-needs planning, or removing assets from a taxable estate.
• Beneficiary Designations. The named recipients on retirement accounts, life insurance, and payable-on-death accounts. These override your will.
• Step-Up in Basis. A tax rule that resets the cost basis of inherited assets to fair market value at the date of death, often wiping out years of embedded capital gains.
• Probate. The court process that retitles assets passing under a will. In Florida it’s manageable but public, takes months, and costs money.

Florida-specific considerations

Florida treats residents favorably in several ways, but it has its own rules worth knowing.

• No state income tax and no state estate or inheritance tax. What passes to heirs isn’t taxed at the state level in Florida.
• Homestead protections. Your primary Florida residence enjoys strong creditor protections and restrictions on who you can leave it to if you have a spouse or minor children.
• Probate. Florida runs either formal or summary administration depending on the size of the estate. Either way it’s a court process, and most families would rather avoid it.
• Federal estate tax exemption. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the federal estate and gift tax exemption is $15 million per person for 2026 (about $30 million for married couples), now made permanent and indexed for inflation starting in 2027. The 2026 annual gift tax exclusion remains $19,000 per recipient.

Most Florida families will never owe federal estate tax. That doesn’t mean planning doesn’t matter. It just means the focus shifts from tax avoidance to coordination, control, and protecting heirs.

Why it matters

Without a plan, the state decides.

• Florida intestacy law dictates who inherits, in what shares. It may or may not match your wishes.
• Family conflicts often surface when there’s no clear direction in writing.
• Probate is slower and more expensive than working through a properly funded trust.
• Beneficiary forms that don’t match the rest of the plan can send money to the wrong person, including an ex-spouse who was never updated.
• Heirs can lose meaningful tax advantages (step-up in basis, stretch opportunities on Roth IRAs) when assets pass the wrong way.

Where the advisor fits in

The attorney drafts. We coordinate. That coordination is where most plans quietly fail.

• Beneficiary designations. These override your will. We review every retirement account, IRA, 401(k), annuity, and life insurance policy to make sure the named beneficiaries match the plan.
• Account titling. Joint, individual, transfer-on-death, or trust ownership each behaves differently at death. We line that up with what the documents say.
• Tax positioning. Roth IRAs, life insurance, and taxable brokerage accounts each pass to heirs with different tax consequences. The order in which you spend, gift, or hold them matters.
• Charitable strategy. Qualified charitable distributions from IRAs, donor-advised funds, and charitable remainder trusts can be efficient ways to support causes and reduce tax exposure.
• The family conversation. We help start the conversation before it has to happen at a funeral.

Expert Tip from Mike

The single biggest gap I see in estate plans isn't the will, it's the beneficiary forms. Families put together a careful will and forget that an old 401(k) still names an ex-spouse, or that a child added as beneficiary at age 8 is now 28 with very different needs. Every retirement account, annuity, and policy needs to match the rest of the plan. The form on file with the custodian wins, every time. When's the last time you reviewed yours?

Mike Garcia, AAMS® · Financial Advisor, BRIA Capital Group

How to start

A signed document on a shelf isn’t a plan. A plan is a set of documents plus accounts titled and beneficiaries named to match.

1. Take inventory. List every account, policy, and property, with the current owner and beneficiary on each.
2. Talk to an estate attorney. Get the four core documents drafted, or updated if they’re more than a few years old.
3. Match the financial side to the documents. Update beneficiaries, retitle accounts, and fund trusts that need funding.
4. Review on a schedule. Marriage, divorce, births, deaths, moves, and major asset changes all warrant a fresh look.

If you’d like a second set of eyes on how your accounts and documents line up, reach out. We’ll review what you have and tell you, plainly, where the gaps are.